


Hope

by SilverMoon53



Series: Silver's Summer '18 Fic-a-thon [13]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety Attacks, Emotional Hurt, Gen, Jemma Simmons Has PTSD, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, guess who finally got caught up and is ready to deliver some angst?, it me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 03:25:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15810336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverMoon53/pseuds/SilverMoon53
Summary: Mack walks in and he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to.





	Hope

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by @writerwisegirl

She doesn’t cry. Doesn’t sob, doesn’t wail or whimper or moan or shatter or break. She thinks of all the other times she’s broken, all the times she’s said to herself, to others, _This is it. I’ve been through too much, I’m broken, too broken, nothing can ever hurt me again,_ and how every time she had been wrong, and how this time she was finally right.

She may not break when Mack walks in, but she’s torn, can feel herself split in two. Part of her wants to scream her sadness to the sky, let the world know of her pain and sorrow and heartbreak and agony, but the rest is calm. She does not flash through the stages of grief, simply finds herself in acceptance as she has so many times before. Of _course_ this has happened. Of course, it happened to the two of them. 

_Of course this is happening, this always happens, to you, to me, to us,_ his LMD had once said to her and now she almost laughs at how right it had been. 

_It’s fitting that we’re down here together, Fitz_ she had told him once and now she almost cries because they’re not together, not anymore and never will be again. 

She doesn’t, though. Doesn’t laugh or cry or break or bend or scream or sob or breathe or wail or, oh, Mack is saying something now but he sounds so very far away and she can’t seem to make out the words and oh, yes, she really should be breathing, shouldn’t she? 

She wakes in the medical wing. For a moment, she thinks it was a dream, that she’ll get up and walk out to the kitchen and he’ll be there, mug in hand. But she knows that’s not true, knows the empty inside of her is whole and true and real, and finds the kitchen as empty as she is and stares at the tea she made until it goes cold and she feels warm arms around a body that isn’t hers. 

“I’m sorry,” Daisy whispers and she feels it and hears it in her ear, but she’s so very far away, floating and falling and thinking about that first time she jumped out a plane, all those years ago, and how she never really found her footing again after that.

***

There is a moment, several days down the line, in which she feels hope. 

“What about Deke?” she asks no one in particular. She hasn’t spoken to anyone in particular, or much at all, since. That is how she phrases it, in her mind. Since. There was before, and there is since. Most people, she knows, would rather have before and after, but to her there is no after, because _after_ means that it - whatever _it_ was - was over and she knows that this - whatever _this_ is - is just beginning. 

Daisy and Mack exchange a look. Daisy looks like she’ll cry the moment she opens her mouth and just shakes her head. 

“We’re not sure,” Mack says, slowly, his voice a soothing rumble that she feels in her bones and she thinks about how he was there for Fitz when she couldn’t be and how she had been mad at him for stealing Fitz from her when really, she had been the one to push him away and now she was just so very, very thankful that he had had someone. “He wanted to explore the world. Daisy thinks he may have left for that, but we’re not sure. We have no way to contact him.” 

“I’m so sorry,” Daisy chokes out. 

“That’s okay,” she says with a nod and a broken smile. She’s mad at herself, as mad as she can get with her numbed and shattered emotions, which isn’t much but enough to make her clench her fist around her mug of tea and wonder if she has enough force to break it and how much less painful the shards would be in her hands. She feels the heat burning through her hands and wonders if she’ll ever feel warm again. 

How foolish of her to have grasped for hope. Didn’t she know, didn’t she remember? Hope had died long ago, in a different solar system, on a barren planet where the sun rose once every 18 years, where Death stalked her every move and followed the scent of blood. 

But that Death had followed her back, hadn’t it? Caused more death, more destruction, more pain? 

But hadn’t Death followed her around even before than that? Hadn’t that boy, Seth Dormer, back at the Academy, died under her hands when she couldn’t do enough? And his friend, Donnie Gill, his death was tied to her, too, wasn’t it? Hadn’t Daisy, Skye back then, almost died because she couldn’t do enough yet again? And those firefighters, hadn’t she barely cared for their deaths, far more fascinated by what had killed them? And Bakshi, whose death was unintentional but she didn’t regret, and Ward, who she promised to kill and tried again and again to follow through? And what of all those who died as a result of the research she did under HYDRA? 

But hadn’t Death continued to follow her, long after Hive was gone? All of the deaths in the Framework, from AIDA, couldn’t she be to blame for them in part? Could she not have prevented Mace’s death? Did she not know the android wasn’t human from the start? Could she not have stopped it all before it even began? And that nameless servant, whose scar she couldn’t prevent, and that Inhuman whose lie saved her but doomed him, hadn’t they both died as a result of her? 

But hadn’t death come for her, too, in the end? Oh, she lived, but hadn’t Death taken from her who she loved most? She had no doubt that Death had come for her, to punish her for her sins, following her as it had for years. 

Death had come for her, yes, but Death knew better than to touch her. Never go for the kill when you can go for the pain and what could be more painful for someone who had faced Death enough to be numb to it? 

Daisy pulls the mug from her hands, the tea splashing loudly down the drain. Warm hands on cold shoulders and Daisy is saying something but she doesn’t listen because she had dared hope and now she’s paying the price for it, feeling herself lose him over again. 

She watches as Daisy leads her back to her bed, tucks her under the blankets and tells her to rest. She nods and closes her eyes and slows her breathing to mimic sleep but doesn’t because she can’t. 

Daisy leaves after a few minutes anyway, because even after everything, even after being through hell and then some, even after watching people die and watching people enslaved and watching people suffer and suffer and suffer, because even after all of that and more, Daisy is still the naive, optimistic hacktivist orphan from the street from all those years ago, easy to fool because she still sees what she wants and hopes to see. Because Daisy still knows what hope is.

_What do you mean, hope?_ she had asked her once, not too long ago but still when she was a different person. 

_I will beat them,_ Daisy had insisted then, conviction as strong as it had been when they first met, _if for no other reason than this: you and Fitz belong together._

“If we belong together, then why is he gone?” she asks now, voice falling flat in the empty room. 

***

She throws herself into work. It’s what she does, it’s who she is, it’s how she copes. It’s what she did when Ward was HYDRA, when Trip died, when Fitz was recovering from his coma, when she got back from space the first time. Keep her hands busy, her mind full no time to dwell on the past, that which can’t be changed.

Only, now, there is nothing to work on. Every other time, there was a problem to solve, some crisis to help avert, some enemy to defeat. Now, of course now, for the first time, there is nothing for her to do. Bureaucracy is the play of the day, the only thing to fight is the press and the news and all the things that she never cared for. 

She finds herself in the lab anyway, working long into the night. Her hands move without thought, eyes watching sightlessly as she conducts experiments she’s done a hundred times before. She knows she should sleep, knows that her body will fail without rest and food and care, but she can’t. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees what happened. 

Only, she wasn’t there when it happened. Mack was, he told her how it happened, it’s not nearly as horrific as she imagines, yet she imagines it anyway. She’s seen so much death in her life, she had thought she was numb to it, she had thought she knew how to keep it inside and make it smaller and smaller and smaller until it was almost gone, how to plant that tiny seed of pain and nurture it into something new. But this hurt is too big and too strong and she can’t make it any smaller no matter what she does and all she can think about is how horrible it must have been for him, how much pain he must have been in. 

“Was he in pain?” she had asked Mack, the first words she spoke since.

“No,” Mack had said after a moment. “He said that the thought his leg was broken, and that he couldn’t feel it. He, uh-” Mack had broken off then, arms crossed tightly in front of him as though he was holding himself together. “He joked about needing to be carried out.”

“Of course he did,” she had replied, and that had been the end of that only it wasn’t. There was no end, there was no after, there was only since. 

There’s nothing for her to work on, it seems. She can’t deal with the public even if she wanted to, and everyone walks on eggshells around her. She asks for assignments but Mack, bless his massive heart, tells her to rest. It’s hard to resent him for that, as much as she wants to. He of all people should know the urge to throw herself into work, to forget the world and get lost in a task, but she knows he means well and can’t fault him for that. 

The two of them had always butt heads. Their personalities were too similar for anything else, both too stubborn and self sure and immovable in their devotion to the task at hand. In all honesty, she admired him greatly, and was immensely glad he had been a friend to Daisy and Fitz when she had not, but did not think the two of them would ever be friends. There was too much between them, too many fights and betrayals and challenges too much bitterness and dislike. She had always respected him, had always trusted him to do what he thought best.

But that did not mean, by any measure, that she would ever do as he told her, just because he told her to.

She finds orders easy to ignore or disobey. There is no punishment anyone could hope to dole out that could hurt her, not anymore. While she appreciates their effort, she works herself weary in the lab every night. She leaves before others wake up, wanders the darkened corners of the base, only joining the others for meals when they hunt her down and drag her to the kitchen. 

She makes tea several times a day but never brings herself to drink it. Always two mugs, the muscle memory is too ingrained in her to make just one, and it hurts too much to watch one drain while the other stays full. The mugs both travel with her as she floats from room to room, growing colder and colder until she pours the tepid drinks down the drain. 

***

She’s in the kitchen, waiting for the boiling water to cool enough to make the tea - Americans always do it wrong, each type of tea has a prefered temperature of water, boiling water kills the leaves and spoils the flavor - when Daisy bursts in. 

“Simmons!” she gasps, breathless, eyes alight with hope and joy and other things she had long since abandoned. 

“Yes, Daisy?” she replies idly, looking back down at the kettle. It was the traditional kind, the type that screams and shrieks when the water boils, and she enjoys hearing the shrill noise and remembering how it always signaled a pause in their arguments because there was tea to make. 

“Simmons, Jemma, we can get him back.” Daisy is still panting, chest heaving, and the words come out in a rush. “We can find him again!”

She freezes, memories of Coulson begging for death, of the GH325 and all the horrors that went along with it, flashing through her mind. “No,” she says firmly. She can’t stand to look at Daisy, to see the hope in her eyes die again and again and again so she turns to make the tea. It’s still too soon, the water is still too hot, but her hands are shaking and she needs something to still them. “No, I won’t put him through that, even if we had any.” Something drips into one of the mugs and she watches the ripples to avoid thinking about what caused them. 

“What? No, no nothing like that!” Daisy grabs her by the shoulders, tight and sure and so, so painfully hopeful. “He’s still alive! He’s just-”

“No!” Her own shout startles her, even as her hands fly up to knock Daisy’s down. Her vision blurs and her chest is tight and her hands are shaking and her whole body is shaking and her throat hurts from the force of her yell. “He’s not! He’s dead, he’s _gone_ , he’s _not coming back_ , he’s-”

“Jemma, no, listen to me!” Daisy tries, but her words are drowned out. 

“Fitz is _dead_!” she screeches, her voice cracking on the last word. She collapses to the floor, all the pain she had been holding suddenly forcing its way out as she screams and sobs and wails and realises that the only reason she didn’t break when she first heard was because she was stitching herself back together for one final shattering. 

Then Daisy is crying too, her face blurry through tears but her hands strong and firm and _there’s that damned hope again,_ she thinks bitterly. 

“Jemma, look at me,” Daisy commands, and she obeys because she is just so tired, so tired of fighting and being lost and unsure and it’s an easy order to follow. “In this timeline, yes. Fitz is-” her voice chokes and she stumbles over the word. “But! But we’re dealing with alternate timelines and other crazy stuff here, and the Fitz that found us in space, in however many years in the future we were, he’s still alive! Right now, that Fitz is alive, and in space, in some sort of cryo-frozen-whatever sleep. We can find him.”

And it’s all too much for her, she never learned how to deal with emotions like this, and she hasn’t slept in days and everything is too overwhelming and the human body can only take so much before it demands a rest and the last thing she sees before her body shuts down is Daisy’s hopeful face and the last thing she hears is Daisy’s hopeful words, “I promise, we _will_ find him,” and the last thing she feels is the last shred of hope within her bursting to life again. 

Then she’s asleep and for the first time since, she doesn’t dream of his death.

**Author's Note:**

> Holy crap I finally finished my summer challenge. I'm so proud of myself! Thanks for joining me on this wild ride! And don't worry, I'm going to keep writing, just no more weekly posts.
> 
> In the meanwhile, talk to me over on Tumblr or Discord. Send me a message, scream with me about shows, or give me a prompt!   
> Writeblr blog: @silverssideblog  
> Discord: cloudcover#7167


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